Don't know anything about youth golf, but my experience as father and uncle is that intercollegiate athletics have contributed greatly to the perversion of other youth sports in US. Not just at D1 level but also at Ivies, Patriot and NESCAC schools in pursuit not of $$ but of status. We have effectively created a system of professional athletics at obscenely young ages.
Bernie,
I think it's safe to say that you and I share a distaste for what's happened to youth sports. The "professionals" though, aren't the kids; it's the coaches that run year-round programs that are called things like travel, select, Olympic Development, and so on. The kids and their families, as I'm sure you know, are shelling out BIG bucks for these programs.
The colleges are only to blame in the sense that the youth program coaches dangle scholarships in front of parents as an incentive to invest now for greater rewards later. That it isn't really true is not the fault of the colleges.
I guarantee you if you interviewed 100 older HS basketball coaches who coached in the days before AAU became huge, like me and my contemporaries, they'd agree to a man that they wished they'd never heard those three letters. Same with baseball coaches and travel baseball, and so on. The big issue, I think, is that kids are forced into choosing a sport much, much to early, and usually for no purpose. Ask college coaches and they'll tell you that they LOVE multi-sport athletes, whose numbers shrink every year.
Big-time college athletics goes back long, long before any of this happened. AAU basketball didn't become big until the mid-90's; same with travel ball and all the rest. And it's a shame that it's come to this; I wish there was a way to put the genie back in the bottle, but I don't know what that would be.